My Favourite Wordpress Widgets!

by VickyC
(Canada)

Wordpress is such a great blogging platform. There are so many themes to choose from, and so many widgets available so you can make your website completely unique – even if you decide to use a pre-made theme. It took me a while to get used to widgets and learn how they work, but so far, my two favorite ones are Google Analytics Dashboard and “I Like This”.

Google Analytics Dashboard enables you to see your site traffic in a graph created by Google Analytics – provided you have your site linked to an Analytics account. I prefer it more to the “statistics” feature that is offered by Wordpress as it is more accurate. Also, it appears right in your dashboard as opposed to the statistics graph that is offered by Wordpress.

This widget also adds analytics to your post section. It shows an individual graph and tells you the number of page views, number of exits and the number of unique visitors for that post. I initially had some problems where the analytics in my post section would give me errors for certain posts, but that hasn’t happened recently – which is great!

Another great widget is the “I Like This” widget. This enables your readers to click “Like” as opposed to typing a comment on your post. Sometimes, people don’t want to comment or don’t like commenting, so having another option open to them is great for receiving positive feedback.

My site is still very new, so the number of widgets I have is very little at the moment. I would like to be able to add more things, such as a reader poll and a “follow me” button for Twitter. Wordpress has been the first blogging platform I’ve used and I really like it. It’s very versatile and there are so many options for my blog. I can change my theme and the layout at any time, and adding new articles is very easy.

The next step for my blog would be to make it into more of a website, by adding proper categories as it just looks like a regular blog site at the moment. I want a theme that allows me to show the different subjects my blog covers as opposed to just listing a whole bunch of posts in chronological order. So I’m looking for a new theme at the moment, and hopefully I will have that enabled soon!

http://vickyc.me